in the head to the heart to the grave
by shira syndrome
Summary: There are habits even Albedo can't break.


Disclaimer: I don't own Xenosaga. As I keeping saying, if I did, the twincest would be fact not fiction. Because we all know the slash is just waiting to happen!

30 kisses theme #24 – _good night_

a/n: Beware of run-on sentences and Albedo being archaic.

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**in the head to the heart to the grave**

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It may look like he's sleeping unbothered in Simeon's embrace, but he's really building monuments with his bloody, bloody hands.

He doesn't need machines to help him slip into the play-world of the Encephalon; it opens to him eagerly like the arms of a calling child. There he thinks of a place that stretches from horizon to horizon and when he's finally reached a point so far away from the universe he gets down on his knees and digs. Eventually the little trinkets he's picked up here and there find their way to him as he's pulling dirt from the round, black holes. When he's finished he'll pick one up and maybe he'll bury it in the hole where the sun can't find it, or maybe he'll stick it in the ground to act as a tiny, tarnished watchdog.

There aren't many places off-world or on-world to do what he does. It's all frosty-white stars and airless sky or artificial light that buzzes on his skin so unnaturally or the scent of metal and booster exhaust and ambition. Even the forests at the Institute were as fake as fake can be, but at least the trees smelled clean and the not-birds chirped and the vid-water burbled and the soil was deep and made his hands dirty.

Nothing like the Encephalon, where any desire of the heart takes on weight and shape and breath. The things felt in the Encephalon are just projections in the mind but they can be as real as you want them to be because, really, the mind can be fooled and flabbergasted so easily that up can be down and down can be up and how would you tell the difference if the signals sent by the brain told you it was true?

You wouldn't. You couldn't. Truth and life are as frail as a candle to a storm, snuffed out faster than you can scream _Albedo how could you?_

Because he's making graves, and if there's one thing he knows, it's that mortal coils are mundane and fleeting, so if you're going to make a grave it has to be special and lasting like life never was (or so advised the green-eyed Executioner, after he discovered he could not evangelize Albedo from this cynical belief in existence). He makes them for all the little lives he's stolen away and tucked in his pocket for the rest of forever, and even the ones he played with and tossed aside like pretty baubles. Their bodies are still rotting wherever they fell to ground last, but he still makes graves for them. In fact there are dozens upon dozens of birch branches poking out of the ground somewhere in this not-world, one for every Kirschwasser that ever loved him.

There's no rhyme or reason to why he does it. There's nothing that holds him to it, nothing that binds him to the living and certainly not the dead. It started with the little stick-graves in the courtyard, meant to ease his torment and childish fears. But even when every other sour and creepy-crawly and bittersweet thing has crawled out of his skin and jumped from his fingers and slipped off his tongue it's a habit he's kept inside himself all the long years, unchanged from the madness and the heartache.

And what's wrong with that? No one has to know. No one has to understand.

He brushes his hands on his knees, content. All the graves and their lopsided markers seem to smile up at him as he rises.

It's about time to leave and return to the flesh and blood of his body. He has things that need to be done and people to meet. He smiles and it reaches to his eyes. The malign glint looks misplaced after all the gentle work he's done. He has to hurry or he'll be late for his appointments.

Little ma pêche is waiting to see him, after all. So is his half-heart. Of course they're both together – how could they not be? Of course he would find his way back to her – and doesn't it just burn him up that Rubedo's ready to kill him a second time on her behalf?

But it's all right.

The chaotic synchronization of their test tube hearts won't plague either one of them much longer. After all, it's only fair he get a chance to sever the link on his side of their deranged merry-go-round of misplaced love and brotherhood.

The last gift his brother ever gave him in good faith – a book, once new, now old and flipped through hundreds and hundreds of times – is resting under the command chair of Simeon. He's already decided he'll bury that book in the hole reserved for Rubedo. He'll dig it with his own two hands just as he did every other hole in this place. Maybe when he's done he'll whisper a thousand secrets he always meant to tell. Maybe he'll kiss the soil and say only three words.

Or maybe he'll just laugh without saying anything.

Because that's what you do when you've dug the only grave that counts.


End file.
